Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration

As the authors show in the first systematic treatment of the subject since the mid-1960s, assimilation continues to shape the immigrant experience. Surveying a variety of domains—language, socioeconomic attachments, residential patterns, and intermarriage—they demonstrate the continuing importance of assimilation in American life.

Table of Contents:
1 Rethinking Assimilation 1 2 Assimilation Theory, Old and New 17 3 Assimilation in Practice: The Europeans and East Asians 67 4 Was Assimilation Contingent on Specific Historical Conditions? 124 5 The Background to Contemporary Immigration 167 6 Evidence of Contemporary Assimilation 215 7 Conclusion: Remaking the Mainstream 271

About the Author :
Richard Alba is Distinguished Professor of Sociology, the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Victor Nee is the Frank and Rosa Rhodes Professor at Cornell University, and Director of the Center for the Study of Economy and Society.

Review :
Sociologists Alba and Nee provide a superb, comprehensive analysis of theory, data, and history to revise past and contemporary understandings of immigration and assimilation in the U.S. Their goal is to respond to skeptics' pessimism about new immigrants' assimilability, question misconception about the assimilation experiences of previous and current immigrant groups, reject normative baggage attached to notions of assimilation, and answer the question, 'What can assimilation look like in such a diverse and ethnically dynamic society?' -- S. M. Green Choice 20040201 Richard D. Alba and Victor Nee have dusted off the idea of assimilation, updated it for the 21st century and found it to be a powerful force in contemporary America--even now. Staying clear of polemics, Messrs. Alba and Nee have contributed a much needed and dispassionate analysis of the current state of immigrant assimilation. They define assimilation not as a linear process of ethnic obliteration but a dynamic one in which minority and majority cultures converge...Like millions of earlier immigrants, in short, the newest immigrants are likely to change America at least as much as America changes them. -- Gregory Rodriguez Wall Street Journal 20030731 A humane and imaginative book which combines social analysis with historical understanding. [Alba and Nee] examine how different groups have increasingly come to share a common culture, a melding that now happens at a faster pace than it ever has in the past. Not the least reason is that even immigrants from the other side of the globe arrive here already familiar with American ways. -- Andrew Hacker New York Review of Books 20030814 There are, to be sure, varying degrees of success and different patterns of adjustment to America, but underlying them all is one powerful "master trend": surprisingly rapid Americanization. The authoritative synthesis of the present processes of assimilation is Richard Alba and Victor Nee's sociological masterpiece, Remaking the American Mainstream. It shows that for nonblacks, assimilation is alive and well in America. It is not passive integration into a static, Anglo-Protestant mainstream (which was always a sociological fiction anyway), but an endlessly dynamic two-way cultural process. -- Orlando Patterson New York Times 20090816